


no one except everybody but you

by falterth



Category: Naruto
Genre: Dark, F/F, Gore, Haruno Sakura is Mentally Unstable, Multi, Time Travel, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 08:30:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15659550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falterth/pseuds/falterth
Summary: Sakura’s back and she wants to die.(Or: the one in which a broken and tired Sakura is sent back in time by a woman she thought had loved her, and she can't pick up the pieces. Not this time. Not ever again. She lives out the rest of her life hating and loving the moon in equal measure.)





	no one except everybody but you

Sakura’s back and she wants to die.

Her skin itches when people look at her, itches with blood and gore and filth and _guilt._ She’s angry. She’s angry, a little girl barely tall enough to reach the high cabinets in the kitchen, angry and bored and knowing that she can’t do anything. Sakura’s been broken for years and she can’t fix it. She hates Naruto, hates Sasuke, hates them both for leaving her alone, hates everyone and it’s all her fault.

They haven’t done anything to her—they’re like little kids, all round faces and innocent smiles. Sakura seethes with anger when she sees them. Horrible thoughts involving her, involving them, involving a hand through her chest and teeth on her throat and—

And every day she wakes up knowing that she can’t do anything, that she won’t do anything, that she’s obsessed with killing them and that she can’t, not yet, at least. Obsessed with tearing their throats out, obsessed with breaking arms and legs and it’s a holy fire in the middle of the night burning her up from the inside out, it’s her face flushed with an all-consuming hatred, a frantic fervor that possesses her on moonless nights and makes her crave blood.

Sakura used to be the hero of her generation. She used to be a paragon of light and healing. She used to be the woman with pink hair who could do everything but bring people back from the dead—and she’d learned to do even that, eventually.

Now she’s just broken, a broken girl in the body of someone that she used to know. She’s a stranger to herself now and she doesn’t like it.

Her chakra coils are shredded. Her body is young and weak. Her mind is in pieces and she can’t pick them up again like she used to. Her Naruto and her Sasuke are gone, replaced by these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed children, and Sakura used to be good but now she hates.

They had a family.

They used to have a family but now it’s Sakura by herself trying to stave off the thoughts that choke her every night. It’s Sakura all alone holding back from snapping a little boy’s neck. It’s Sakura and nobody else desperately trying to fix her chakra pathways and knowing that she can’t but trying anyway because she wants she wants she _wants_ and only being able to use the smallest of jutsu isn’t _enough—_ she wants to feel the earth tremble beneath her, wants to be able to leap up into the sky and take the moon with her, wants to be able to swamp enemies in layers of earth and mud and stone, thick and mean and unforgiving. It’s Sakura by herself trying to go back, hating Kaguya and hating the dreams about her and hating the feeling of the moon goddess’ arms around her waist, hating the feeling of cool lips against hers and hating that she’d once been one of the good guys. In the end, though, she’d just been another pawn in the game, and when her queen had grown tired of her, she’d been thrown to the wolves.

She hates that she let herself be seduced by power.

She hates she hates she _hates._

Sakura wakes up screaming these days. Her screams are all madness, all fury, all crazed laughter and choked-off shouts and _Kaguya!_ and beauty and blood and death and murder.

Eventually, she turns to using her teeth and nails, sharpening them meticulously every day, and starts killing in the night. The moon doesn’t own her. Kaguya can’t have her. She is her own woman and every time her teeth go into some poor civilian’s throat, every time her nails are caked with blood, she thinks, _good. They deserve it._

She is trapped and the only company she has is her thoughts.

She’d _had_ something there, for a moment, after her teammates had died and she’d been broken and worried, crushing the earth with her bare fists and hoping and hoping and _hoping,_ but they’d been dead for so long already and she couldn’t bring them back. They’d been dead for so long, and no matter what she tried she couldn’t bring them back. No matter what she tried, all she’d ended up with was a messy pile of flesh and bones. They weren’t even bodies.

Naruto and Sasuke had died and her spirit had snapped in half, and all the love had drained out of her like blood out of a fresh cut, and she’d gone out and torn herself to shreds trying to kill the woman who killed them.

Yes, she had had something. A flash of sanity. Or—more likely—a dip into madness.

Kaguya had found her on the ground, dust covering her face, tears like acid and blood like poison and it was all coming out of _her,_ out of _Sakura,_ who had once been the leader of the right side but was now nothing. Sakura, who’d had all that she could have ever wanted. Sakura, who was gone.

And she had just been an experiment to the moon goddess. She had loved the moon and the moon hadn’t loved her back.

Right now, she’s broken, hunched over her chakra theory textbooks with glazed over eyes, and right now, in this moment, she loves and won’t _admit_ that she loves the moon, and the moon looks back at her, cold and cruel and unloving. Sakura wants to scream.

She spends months trying to repair herself and in the end she’s broken. Barely-functioning chakra systems, a mind that’s gone more often than it is home. A broken woman in the broken body of a small girl who’s a stranger to her now, a broken woman with broken dreams chasing after somebody who will never go back to her: this is all she is.

Sakura used to be good. She wonders what happened to herself.

She’s not surprised when it becomes too much for her.

She’s not surprised when she starts to smooth out, starts to harden into a cold mask of apathy, and years start to pass in the blink of an eye.

She’s not surprised when she’s put on a genin team with Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke. Fate works like this. She used to dismiss Neji for babbling what she’d thought was nonsense at the time. Now she walks along the red string, keeping things in balance, always in danger of toppling off.

She’s not surprised when she takes one look at their innocent _fucking_ faces and bloodlust rises up inside of her like a tall wave. There are visions of blood and of crunching bones. Sakura does not let it show.

She’s not surprised when she kills them that night. She can’t _take it_ anymore. And anyway—she’d planned this for _years._ She hates them for dying, hates them for leaving alone, and for the first time in ten years she feels happy.

Sakura feels like a queen, regal and elegant and savage, when her fingers burrow into Sasuke’s head and his eyes come out, when she presses _deeper_ and his blood spills out over onto her and her teeth spill over into his throat. She makes it last a while. She hates him, she _hates_ him, and his blood is disgusting and tangy and makes her want to vomit—but revenge is sweet, and that’s why she doesn’t spit.

For Naruto, it’s quicker—he was always her favorite. That doesn’t mean it’s painless. She pins him with her arms and legs and wakes him up, breathes on him and feels adrenaline spiking in her veins. She revels in the thrill of the hunt for a moment and when wide blue eyes come up to meet hers, when a voice, cracked from disuse and so _soft_ that she wants to kill him _right then and there_ instead of hearing him out says, “Sakura-chan?” she loses it. Her teeth sink into the soft exposed flesh of his throat, and her canines go into an artery, and she _holds_ him there, closing her eyes against the first spray of blood, until he bleeds out.

She smiles, and somewhere deep inside her mind where the last part of the good Sakura lives dies right then and there, mourning the loss of the boys she’d thought she’d loved. Once upon a time.

She isn’t surprised by any of this.

Everyone else is.

She’s not surprised when she goes down fighting, when she burns of the rest of her chakra coils and takes two ANBU out.

She’s not surprised when they throw her in jail and she’s not surprised when the Yamanaka that tries to look inside of her can’t get in. Nobody is allowed inside Sakura’s head but herself.

She’s not surprised when she’s brought out for a public execution.

Her mind tells her so many different things. Her hands are bound behind her back. She can’t escape. She isn’t sure if she _wants_ to escape.

Someone brings down a blade.

Haruno Sakura used to be one of the good guys.

She dies, and her last thought is _finally._


End file.
